The goal is to market yourself strategically, to make yourself a product that one person -- the right person -- will buy. If it sounds studied, it is.

Her marketing-based, capital-P Program is the result of research skills honed at Harvard and personal experiences from both her relationships and her friends'. It was an early attempt to follow this plan (specifically step No. 12), even before it was published, that helped her find her own husband, Brad Greenwald. Today, it's one of the reasons her name is associated with more than 800 successful couples.

Although we can't give away all the details -- she wrote an entire book devoted to the subject, after all -- here are the steps Greenwald walks readers through in her first book:

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But before you jump into the deep end (or head to the library), there's an important question here: Who should work invest in a matchmaker, and why? To answer that question (and many more across the next few days), we spoke to one of Greenwald's former students, Happily Ever Afters' Jaime Richards, who spent weeks walking me through her process of preparing for a full-on search for local love. Hint: The results were occasionally disastrous, through no fault of hers. (Just mine.)

Stay tuned over the next week for more tips and anecdotes on that front. But in the meantime, here are Richards' reasons for seeking professional romantic help:

1. There is nothing more important than finding and choosing a good mate. Who you wake up next to for the rest of your life will impact everything thing in your life from your finances to your health and parenting experience. 2. We're not often taught the skills that we need to learn how to date right. We learn how to operate in our career, but almost no education is received in relationships. 3. It's so hard to be objective about how you might be received on dates and also in your online dating profile. 4. Dating is something you only get to practice when you're single, so most people don't have a lot of time to really master it. The cost of time invested to read and research everything that a dating coach has researched is enormous, and their fees are just a fraction of what it would cost you in your hourly wage to find the information out there that is pertinent to you and your situation. 5. Having someone objectively help you find who you "need" instead of who you "want" can often make all the difference in the world. People so often do not look for what they really need in a relationship to achieve a healthy dynamic. Instead, they chase hot, instant chemistry, that leads to relationships that are full of tension and discord and are sadly unfulfilling.